Meta is Planning to Open Its First Retail Store in California
The Meta retail store will feature virtual reality gaming demos.
Meta is planning to launch its first hardware retail store that will be open from May 9 in its Burlingame, California campus. The store will allow visitors to try out and buy Portal videophones and Quest virtual reality headsets by the brand. The customers can also demo the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses and get help ordering them online.
The Meta retail store
This unique store will include a demo area for Portal where people can test its video calling features with a store employee. A separate space is present to test several Quest 2 demos. The list includes Beat Saber, Real VR Fishing, GOLF+, and Supernatural. The visitors will take home a 30-second mixed reality clip that shows them playing a game.
Visitors can also try different Ray-Ban glasses styles and test their capabilities before buying. These glasses capture and share video with built-in cameras. Meta will also add a “Shop” tab to its website to allow people to find all its products in one place online.
The store’s opening is a big leap for the company in the arena of hardware sales. But this step is not new, as companies like Google have already done.
Though Meta has partnered with Best Buy on demo stations for its VR headsets, and several Ray-Ban Stories have appeared in the sunglasses company’s own stores, the new store is exceptionally distinctive. It will open another opportunity to sell people on still-unusual virtual and augmented reality tech. It is also known as Metaverse and is a major area of focus for the company.
The store is quite small for a tech giant like Meta. It’s a small 1,550-square-foot store which is located near Meta’s Reality Labs headquarters at 322 Airport Boulevard in Burlingame. Its operational hours would be 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM Monday through Friday (which isn’t wise as most people are at work during those hours).
In a statement, Meta store head Martin Gilliard said that the Burlingame location of the store “gives us more opportunity to experiment and keep the customer experience core to our development,” lessons from which will “help define our future retail strategy.”
Share this on social media
